Korean workers rally
On November 10, tens of thousands of Korean workers took to the street of Seoul at the call of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). They marched to demand reforms to the country's repressive labour laws, inherited largely untouched from past dictatorships. The day before, the Commission on Industrial Relations Reform, formed in May by President Kim Young-sam to propose reforms to the National Assembly, was dissolved. The labour movement fears that Kim will cave in to bosses' strong lobbying against the reform proposals.
Current labour legislation prohibits the existence of more than one labour trade union centre, thus outlawing the 400,000-strong independent KCTU. It also prevents public service workers, including teachers, from forming trade unions and forbids "third party intervention" in labour disputes, including trade union officials advising workers on how to handle their grievances. The "third party intervention" provision has led to the arrest of more than 2000 trade unionists since 1988, including KCTU vice-president Yang Kyu-hun, who has been detained since February.
US broadcasts to China
Beijing has accused the US and other western nations of "rely[ing] on the superiority of their communication and information technology to increasingly launch Cold War propaganda" against it, and of using "news media ... to create chaos, and to destroy the stability of these [Asian] countries". The remark came one day after a US-funded radio station, Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts news to China in Chinese, announced that it planned to broadcast uncensored news to Tibet and expand Chinese broadcasts. The Chinese government likens Radio Free Asia to the anticommunist Radio Free Europe.